I'm working an extremely sparse 10 hours per week in the Science Center stockroom. After checking my email for the hundredth time, desultorily reading The New Yorker, and lazily scanning my Classical Greek syllabus, I have decided to start this blog. Documenting one's inactivity minutely seems to justify it somehow.

I took a break from writing this blog (2 sentences was exhausting) and read a bit more New Yorker. In an article about a nomadic man preparing to raft across the Pacific Ocean, I found this quote: Like many people who behave capriciously, Neutrino believes that he acts only after much reflection. This reminded me of the reaction of most people to my story about moving to San Francisco. To them, it seems like a capricious act, and they confer upon it a sense of daring, excitement, and danger. In reality, I experienced the decision as the very end of a long period of gestation, like giving birth to another species after years of labor. The result was suprising, even to me, but the fact that something had to be born after all that work was undeniable, even pedestrian. Reflection does not always lead to external logic, but it inevitably gives birth to a product that resembles the internal structure of its mother. My move to San Francisco seemed inevitable to me, even though I had no previous stated intention to do so. Are there really people who live only through a process of external logic? For instance, they have a plan that applies to the world outside themselves, and then follow that plan?

Yesterday I had a related series of thoughts. I realized that the good, exciting, worthy events of my life feel extremely random to me. I do not have a sense of "deserving" them, of having to worked to reach them, of being "worthy" of them in and of myself. I have assumed that other people do not experience life this way - that others experience honors, diplomas, praise, and other such occurrences as following a strict internal and external logic. Yesterday it occurred to me that perhaps most lives seem similarly accidental to their owners. In fact, we probably do not "own" our lives the way we think we should. If no one really lives this way, then how did there come to be the myth of the consciously-lived life? How did we come to expect that we would follow a linear path to reward? Like so many other social myths, this one seems "true". I am still struggling with the recognition that adulthood is not a place to which I can travel, arriving in tact with all the amenities already in place.

My first inkling of the nebulous quality of adulthood came when I was promoted to Manager a few years ago. I was 26 or so, and felt in no way qualified to be Manager of anything. I finally realized that no one is really qualified for anything before they do it. Most adults stumble along the same way they did as children, but without the magical confidence of a child. Adults paste confidence on their skins, in the form of clothing, titles, diplomas, money, and other trappings. Adulthood is another myth. Personal growth takes many forms and never ends, but one can never get to adulthood. Pieces of it drift in and out of consciousness like particularly sneeze-inducing pollen.

Addendum: reading about Herman Kahn and post-WWII defense intellectuals in the New Yorker. Struck by this parallel (perhaps pedestrian, but new to me): trying to predict terrorism, Cold War retaliatory scenarios, or the movement of "the enemy" is akin to Phillip K. Dick's supposition about future crime. By eradicating possible horrors several steps ahead of the present, we destroy the possibility of change, hope, rehabilitation, interaction, capriciousness, etc. Since we cannot know with any certainty what the future holds, we attack it at our own peril, and at the peril of human society. Also, our modeling of the future tends to be based on the past and present, while the actual future often holds things we could never have imagined. Defense planning and strategy is inherently flawed.